Musical Ambassadors of Peace

If you watched Ari Honarvar’s interview on The Young Turks and want to find out more about our Northern Triangle Project in Tijuana go to the Projects Menu and then under the “Refugee Support” category click on “Northern Triangle.”

Ari Honarvar, Musical Ambassador from Iran of Musical Ambassadors of Peace traveled across the border from San Diego to Tijuana on March 12, 2019. “We got to play, drum, and dance with our asylum-seeking friends waiting to be processed in Tijuana. We met asylum seekers from Nicaragua, Haiti, and Mexico with heartbreaking stories but hopefully our session helped lift their spirits. We didn’t have enough drums, so we cut up wood and used drumsticks to make music. I think it worked out well!”

Over 20,000 Yazidi refugees, including hundreds of recently freed ISIS sex slaves, live in tents in the outskirts of Duhok in norther Iraq. For the past 4 years, these refugees have been enduring extreme poverty, intermittent electricity, unbearable heat of the summer and the biting cold of the winter. Lack of adequate funds and government corruption has contributed to perpetuating their untenable and re-traumatizing living conditions.

Last month, Dilkhwaz Ahmed, our Musical Ambassador, held healing drum circles, bringing hope and renewal to Yazidi women and children and provided a safe space to share their stories. She trained other women to continue the sessions and also purchased 10 goats and several sewing machines and fabric so the women could earn a modest living.

Our Musical Ambassador has returned in June, 2018, to work with the surviving Yazidi women in Northern Iraq.

We need to fund-raise now to pay her expenses!

At last week’s women’s circle, Dilkhwaz shared her wisdom and her singing bowl and Chuyun led us in a dance, embodying loss.

With elegance, grace and vulnerability, each woman followed Chuyun’s example and danced, remembering what they had lost. At the end of the exercise, there was not a dry eye left in the place. One woman shared the abuse that robbed her of her childhood, some recalled losing their loved ones in the war, one woman missed a daughter she hadn’t been able to visit in years.
The circle allowed each woman to feel both vulnerable and supported. Their tears, their sadness, and grief had such raw beauty and tenderness, I was in awe. In that moment I was reminded that even if we’re broken, healing is just one heartbeat away. A supportive community’s heart beats as one, helping us heal. Being in a community allows us to help others heal. I’m forever grateful for these women and their courage to share their vulnerability. I was crying so didn’t document that part of the workshop.

San Diego State University and Musical Ambassadors of Peace have joined to co-produce these Sing and Drum and Dance events for Refugee Women and Children!

The final performance for these workshops has been scheduled for October 19th (Friday) from 7:30 pm to 9 pm at Smith Recital Hall at SDSU.

News Flash!

The San Diego Union-Tribune is covering our healing work for Iraqi, Syrian and Afghani refugees in Southern California!

Text From San Diego Union-Tribune Article - Toggle Open or Closed with Red Icon to the Right!

About thirty refugee women sat in a circle at a church in El Cajon on a recent Monday morning, thrumming the pulse of a heartbeat on hand drums and with shakers.

Under the guidance of Ari Honarvar, they played first for a member of one of the organizations involved in the drum circle who had recently had surgery.

Then, Honarvar told them to play for women in Syria who were suffering from escalations in violence there. The thrumming became loud throbs.

In partnership with License to Freedom, a nonprofit that focuses on helping refugees and immigrants who are survivors of domestic violence, since September, Honarvar has led twice-monthly drum circles in El Cajon designed to help participants heal from trauma they’ve experienced.

“It’s basically to create a sense of belonging, which is as important as anything when you’ve been through something major,” Honarvar said.

Part of the purpose is to allow the women to have fun and to laugh, she said, but it’s also to give them a safe space to access darker emotions from their past.

“Sometimes those different emotions that end up being in the background, if we experience them, that could be more valuable than 1,000 laughs because once we experience it, we can process and let it go,” Honarvar said.

Ari Honarvar leads a group of El Cajon women in a drum circle. (Kate Morrissey/San Diego Union-Tribune)
Dilkhwaz Ahmed, founder and executive director of License to Freedom, said she hopes the drum circle program will strengthen the overall health and wellness of El Cajon’s refugee community by giving women confidence to be leaders in their community. She also sees it as a way to build cross-cultural bridges between members from different countries in the Middle East.

At the beginning of the drum circle, Honarvar took the women through breathing exercises. Throughout the session, she checked in with them, asking how different segments made them feel.

They drummed to the rhythm of the women’s names and played musical chairs. The room filled with joyous cries and laughter as the women danced in a circle inside a shrinking number of chairs and raced each other to sit down when the drumming stopped.

“How was that for you?” Honarvar asked.

“Beautiful!” one woman said.

“Happy!” another chorused. Many of the women in the room have learned that word in English.

“We forgot about a lot of terrible things,” Ahmed said, translating for one of the women who answered in Arabic.

“We remember playing as little kids, drumming on pots and pans,” she added, interpreting for another.

“For a short moment, we forget about everything, just ourselves,” Ahmed translated for a third. “We forget what’s going on outside.”

They shared songs from their home countries — Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

Honarvar asked the group how each is doing with goals they set together, including learning English.

“We are in the beginning,” one woman responded in Arabic. “We are trying so hard.”

“I am 10 percent,” another said in English.

Honarvar, who is originally from Iran and translates and performs the work of Rumi, a 13th century Persian poet, spoke to the women almost exclusively in English to help them learn.

Ahmed then translated to Arabic. One woman from Afghanistan translated that to Dari for two others from her country.

A woman at the drum circle in El Cajon plays one of the hand drums. (Kate Morrissey/San Diego Union-Tribune)
Golnar Naebezdeah and Razya Hassan Ali, two of the woman from Afghanistan, said their favorite thing about coming to the circles is how much they get to laugh.

Rasha Albudiana, 33, came to the U.S. from Syria with her five children a little over a year ago and has been attending the drum circles for about five months.

“I feel so relaxed and connected with this group here in this class. I feel so happy,” Albudiana said. “When I go home, I take this happiness with me to my kids.”

Honarvar learned to lead healing drum circles through a Colorado-based group called Musical Ambassadors of Peace, which partners with License to Freedom to put on the program. Her trainer, Christine Stevens, lives in Encinitas.

Stevens, who is a trained music therapist, explained that there’s scientific evidence that programs like the drum circles can help with mental health and overcoming trauma.

“The way we use drums for therapy is based on the fact that everyone has rhythm. Everyone has a heartbeat,” Stevens said. “Having a sense of control and a sense of support is healing.”

She said San Diego should be proud of the El Cajon drum circle project.

“I don’t know of anyone doing anything as innovative,” Stevens said.

At the end of the El Cajon drum circle, the women stood holding hands and said one word to describe what they were feeling. Happy was the most common response.

As she said goodbye to Ahmed, one woman told her, “My heart is broken, but I feel better. I have hope.”

Musical Healing for Yazidi women in Iraq

Musical Ambassadors of Peace sent 70 drums with our Musical Ambassador to Iraqi Kurdistan to provide healing energy for Yazidi women recently liberated from 2 years of enforced sexual slavery under ISIL.

A Yazidi woman who was kidnapped and sold as a slave after her family was massacred said: “Death has lost its terrors. Death is harmless compared to the hell we all had to go through.”

Arriving north of Mosul in Duhok province of Iraq, our Musical Ambassador, Dilkhwaz Ahmed, got to work with these strong survivors!

Donations can be made right here on this website or through the new GoFundMe campaign to specifically support our work with the Yazidi women.

“I had the privilege to work with amazing Yazidi women on the second anniversary of their genocide and help heal the wounds of war.” – Dilkhwaz Ahmad, Musical Ambassador of Peace

Musical Healing for Refugee Women In the USA

Musical Ambassadors of Peace has been conducting deep emotional healing with refugee women from Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria using musical and drumming techniques to enable on-going in-depth PTSD relief. Ari Honarvar, our Musical Ambassador from Iran, has been conducting sessions twice a month in El Cajon, in Southern California, with groups of these refugee women. Without Ari and Musical Ambassadors of Peace they would have limited options for help with emotional healing.

Refugee Women in El Cajon to Perform at San Diego World Music Center

Musical Ambassadors of Peace and License to Freedom and Upbeat Drums have collaborated to produce these regular weekly gatherings. Now an event has been scheduled June 21, 2018 for World Refugee Day at World Music Center.

Click button to the right to see event information!

Go to the “Projects” menu and check out some of our other activities!

To learn more about our past history working with these Iraqi, Syrian and Afghani refugees in El Cajon: Click Here and Click Here!

Latest Gofundme Campaign: Inspiration for Musical Ambassadors

Our Musical Ambassador from Iran, Ari Honarvar, recently published an article in YES Magazine about one of our programs for refugees.

YES Magazine reaches more than 150,000 readers quarterly.

More than 350,000 people visit their website each month.

Amid Travel Ban, Refugee Women Cope

With Trauma and Stress Through Drum Circles

How music is helping women from war-torn countries express grief and loss.

YES Magazine Article Text: Click to Expand

More than three dozen women and children sit in a circle

inside the conference room of a public library in El Cajon, California, each holding a hand drum on their laps. No one is speaking.

I stand in the center and ask who in this group of Afghan, Iraqi, and Syrian women has suffered loss. Several hands go up. I then ask: "Who would like to volunteer to express their feeling of loss, using the drum as their voice?"

Sahad Alboshokaf, a 44-year-old Iraqi woman, wearing a grey tunic and a hijab, raises her hand. She closes her eyes and begins tapping her drum, tentatively at first and then with deliberate purpose. The rest of us listen and then join in, blending our beats to match the rhythm of her lead. Soon the room is filled with the reassuring sound of our collective beat.

Alboshokaf, like the rest of us in the room, is a refugee - part of a unique refugee-led drum circle designed to help new arrivals not only cope with stress in their lives, but integrate into new homes in this country.

The drum circle arose as a way to address the psychological needs of newly arriving refugees.

Adding to their anxiety has been the Trump administration's attempts this year to ban travel from predominantly Muslim countries, where many of these women still have family. It has made them feel targeted. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling Monday allowing the administration to fully enforce visa restrictions for people from six countries - Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen - means the wait for some of them to reunite with loved ones may have grown even more uncertain.

The drum sessions create an atmosphere of belonging and put us in rhythm with each other. The drums become our voice. Studies have shown that recreational music-making in general and group drumming in particular can decrease stress and change the genomic stress marker. Drumming has the "therapeutic potential" to relax tension and soothe emotional wounds.

Many, if not all the refugees in our drum circle suffer some form of PTSD or depression. All together, we speak four different languages and dialects. Transcending those barriers, drumming gives us an avenue for self-expression. After each woman has "spoken" her feelings through her music - desperation, frustration, happiness, fear - the rest of the circle provides verbal feedback and insight into what we heard in her beat.

The drum circle arose organically as a way to address the psychological needs of newly arriving refugees in the San Diego area, which has the largest concentration of Syrian and Iraqi refugees in the U.S.

While there has been an outpouring of local support for their material needs, "what we need is ongoing services to help the refugees find their way," said Dalia Alzendi, founder of Bridge, a local nonprofit specializing in psychosocial integration for refugees.

The idea for the circle is the outgrowth of a unique Colorado-based nonprofit called Musical Ambassadors of Peace. MAP ambassadors study the indigenous songs and music of countries that receive unfavorable media coverage in the U.S. and Europe and then use that music to build cross-cultural bridges between the people of those countries and people in the U.S.

Its co-founders, Cameron Powers and Kristina Sophia, have been utilizing music's transformative power for two decades and can perform songs in 13 different languages. Shortly after the American-led invasion of Iraq, the two traveled to Baghdad and, armed with only an oud and Iraqi love songs, began playing and singing in the streets. The Iraqi people, who up to that point had mostly encountered only U.S. military personnel and contractors, were seeing a different side of America. They saw their trips to different countries as a form of musical mission work.

"We call ourselves reverse missionaries because our job is to listen, not to preach," Sophia says.

Now the group has several musical ambassadors from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Their motto: Healing the world through music.

Earlier this year, MAP set out to provide an ongoing music-centered service for U.S. refugees, many of them from countries the group has visited. As a refugee from Iran, I knew I wanted to become a MAP ambassador and took a workshop to become a HealthRhythms facilitator.

Now, alongside another refugee, Dilkhwaz Ahmed, an Iraqi who founded the nonprofit License to Freedom, I co-facilitate the San Diego area drum circle. How ironic that Ahmed and I both were children on the opposite sides of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, with different languages but similar experiences. Now we are not only friends, but allies in the mission to help fellow refugees succeed. We drum twice a month and hope to increase it to once a week next year.

Originally, Ahmed, who also translates my English instructions for the circle's Arabic-speaking members, had reserved the library space so that refugee women and children could meet a few times a month to talk and do arts and crafts. That meeting morphed into the drum sessions.

After Alboshokaf is done drumming, I ask her if she feels heard by us. "I do," she replies, in Arabic. "Do I have your permission to ask everyone what they heard in your beat?" I ask. She nods.

"Desperation," a middle-aged woman in a striped sweater says. "Hopelessness," a young Syrian woman chimes in.

Naturally. Alboshokaf says later that she still feels the loss of her father and two brothers, who were executed by Saddam Hussein. She lives with her two teenage sons, anxious for the day her husband will join them here. But because of restrictions imposed on refugee visas by the Trump administration, she's lost hope that it will be anytime soon. Music helps her express these feelings of loss, frustration, and confusion in a nonthreatening way.

I ask the group if anyone else has felt loss and found a way to transform their feelings. Nahidah, a hijabi woman with a bright smile, begins drumming a whimsical beat. We all follow and the mood of the room shifts to one of playfulness. I ask Nahidah about her experience with transforming loss. "Happiness is always just a step away. It's good to mourn, but laughter waits for you," she says.

Often, these sessions bring me back to my time when I first arrived in the U.S. as a 14-year-old refugee and stumbled across my first drumming circle. I was living in Austin, Texas, and the group of hippies my friend and I found in a park were quite different from the refugees I work with now.

But the impact of their music was no less impactful. Like a moth drawn to the flame, I made my way to the middle of the circle and began dancing until I was drenched in sweat. My friend wasn't surprised. She had seen me dance spontaneously whenever I heard music. In fact, for my first few years in America, I listened to music incessantly and sought out every opportunity to dance because in Iran, the county I escaped from, music and dancing were illegal.

I ask if anyone else in the circle would like to drum their feeling. Nasima Hossaini, a dignified young Afghan woman, raises her hand. Hossaini looks to me for permission and then begins beating the drum with explosive fury, changing the mood of the room yet again. Reinforcing her feeling, we all join her beat for several minutes. She later recounts her experience as an Afghan refugee in Iran, where she encountered prejudice on a daily basis. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, she returned home, where, to her dismay, she came across more prejudice for belonging to the Hazara ethnic minority.

This sense of not-belonging has injured her far worse than the trauma of war.

One by one, women come forth to drum their feelings with the group - a woman who lost her favorite cousin to a car explosion; an overwhelmed single mother who's worried about her autistic child. Soon the bounds of language and otherness dissolve and our hearts open up to the rhythmic telling of one story after another. One of those was Ahlam Salem's, an Iraqi woman who afterward shared the harrowing details of being kidnapped, tortured, and raped for eight days. She had been on a bus in Baghdad heading home when armed men stormed the bus at a bus stop and took her to an unknown location. Salem is still dealing with the aftermath, but she feels strong and wants to let other women in similar situations know that they don't have to identify with their trauma. "We are much more than that," she says in Arabic. She is hopeful and wants to advocate for women's rights. "The drumming makes me feel more relaxed and confident," she adds.

As we begin to wrap up, 8-year-old Yousif Mikaeel raises his hand and asks, "Can I drum my feeling?" Children know they're part of this community and want to participate. Several people praise Mikaeel for his courage, and he begins. He drums an anxious beat and the rest of us follow along for a while. A young woman volunteers to help transition the beat of fear to a more hopeful one and Mikaeel, and the rest of us, follows her lead.

By the end of the session, we are all giddy with a sense of camaraderie. And as we pack away the instruments, many of the women explain how these sessions help them navigate the language barrier, culture shock, and the stress of finding their way in a different culture and country.

"Our gathering helps me immensely," Alboshokaf says as she walks out with her younger boy. "I feel the stress dissolve in the sounds of our rhythm. I feel calm and more able to deal with my life."

As of March 21, 2018, this YES Magazine article has been shared over 1000 times on Facebook and has reached over 8000 Journalists!

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Musical Ambassador Dr. Craig Woodson working with children in Iraqi Kurdistan

Musical Ambassador Christine Stevens in Iraqi Kurdistan

Here is what the Lonely Planet Has to Say about Our Work:

May, 2009 Lonely Planet Guide to the Middle East: Musicians for Peace. Article by Anthony Ham describes work of Musical Missions of Peace in Arab World

Musicians for Peace

It’s not every American musician who can claim to have learned to play the oud (Middle Eastern lute) like an Iraqi, mastered the complexity of the maqam scale system and played love songs on a Baghdad street in the dangerous aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq. But then Cameron Powers is not your ordinary musician.

Together with his partner, singer Kristina Sophia, Powers was seriously disillusioned with his country’s response to the terrorist attack on 11 September 2001. When we caught up with them in Lattakia, Syria, in May 2008 on their fifth visit to the region, Powers and Sophia spoke of how they performed with a Palestinian musician in Boulder, Colorado two weeks after the attacks, a concert that only went ahead when the word “Palestinian” was removed from the promotional material. Experiences such as these prompted the couple to make their first trip to the Middle East in November 2002, hoping to build bridges between Western and Arab cultures through what they call “the warmth, beauty and sensuality of Arab music.”

The welcome they received from ordinary Arabs convinced them to return. In Spring 2003, impromptu performances for the Iraqi visa-issuing authorities and border officials saw Powers and Sophia granted permission to enter Iraq – “music is an instant passport” is his explanation. Unable to find any functioning concert venues in post-invasion Baghdad, they simply began performing on the streets. “The fact that we were on the streets of Baghdad singing Iraqi love songs, showed the Iraqi people that Americans could also invade with music,” Powers told us. He later wrote a book Singing in Baghdad (available from www.gldesignpub.com) about the experience. A performance before 60,000 people in Cairo followed the same year.

Struck by the warmth of the welcome they received in the Middle East, the couple realized that American audiences needed to hear an alternative vision of the Middle East as much as ordinary Arabs needed to feel their solidarity. Since then, the couple has covered more than 60,000km and performed at over 200 presentations in universities, schools and churches across the US. Nonetheless, they still find themselves confronted with the suspicions of post-9/11 America: “We encounter fear first and then openness to the music. It used to be the other way around.” To learn more about their work and travels, visit their website, www.musicalmissions.com.

Not content with the power of performance, Powers and Sophia have set up a secular NGO, Musical Missions of Peace (www.musicalmissionsofpeace.org) which is based around the premise that “People who have learned and sung each others’ popular love songs together are less likely to war with one another than those who have not. The NGO provides support to Iraqi musicians and refugees in exile in Jordan and Syria and promotes education and performance of international music in the US.

Musical Ambassador histories in South America

Hundreds of shows across the USA

Work in the Middle East

History of work in Iraq

Work in Iraqi Refugee community in El Cajon, CA, USA

Concert in Syria

Supported Iraqi refugee musician Fadi Aziz

Make a One-time or Recurring Donation to Musical Ambassadors of Peace(Also known as Musical Missions of Peace)